


i know their names, i carry their blood too

by QuidProCrow



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket, All the Wrong Questions - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Family, Gen, V.F.D., also one small girl trying to avoid a decent amount of trauma and loss, i feel i should maybe warn for that, legit vfd recruitment in action, most of the time by herself, one small girl going through a lot of unpleasantness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-27 00:09:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15674052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuidProCrow/pseuds/QuidProCrow
Summary: A man has come back to the city. Beatrice Baudelaire, eight years old and miles away, is trying to find him.





	i know their names, i carry their blood too

**Author's Note:**

> this fic relies pretty heavily on **the beatrice letters** , and there are a few references and one code that will make a lot more sense if you’ve read **all the wrong questions** and **the unauthorized autobiography**! 
> 
> title from [the crooked kind by radical face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLccI7_MbA)

Beatrice learns early on, at seven and with a bare ankle because they said they don’t require the tattoo anymore, that if she turns the doorknob slowly and lifts it up at the same time, her bedroom door doesn’t stick when it opens. At eight, she learns if she stays close to the hallway wall, avoids the places where the floor groans under her feet, especially in the spot in front of the chaperone’s room, then she can make it in absolute silence to the staircase. The stairs are trickier—most of the steps have warped over time—so she wraps her hands tight around the banister and inches along the edge until she stretches out a tentative foot and finds the smooth carpet of the ground floor rug under her socks. 

At almost one in the morning, everything, every overstuffed armchair and faded green wall and well-stocked pantry, is smothered in black shadows. Beatrice doesn’t mind. She can still find her way around. She had walked around for a week with her eyes closed to prove a point a few months ago. (The point was that she could tell anyone by their footsteps, which she could. The result was that she could navigate the entirety of headquarters in the middle of the night. She knows every creak in every floorboard _and_ what everyone’s shoes sound like now.) 

A proper adult might ask her if she’d like a light on so she can see a little easier at one in the morning. A proper adult would probably think she’d be afraid of the dark, after everything that happened. Then again, a proper adult would probably not have put her in this situation to begin with. She’s not entirely sure. She’s only known a few proper adults in her life, or people older and taller than her to the point she considered them adults. She hopes she’ll know at least one more. 

From the report a volunteer smuggled to her during dinner in the mashed potatoes—and from the confirmation from another volunteer during dessert, waving his spoon through the air at her—and from the further confirmation from the chaperones standing in a corner with their heads together and mumbling not very quietly at all—a man was seen. Far away, on the thirteenth floor of one of the nine dreariest buildings in the city. A man they tell stories about, a man no one seems to know for sure, a man who might be a detective, or has had that printed on an office door at one point or another. A man who hasn’t been seen in a long, long time. 

“That’s him,” Beatrice had said. 

“How do you know?” a volunteer had asked. “ _You’ve_ never seen him either.” 

Beatrice hasn’t, but she thinks she’s allowed to make an educated guess here. A niece should know her own uncle, even by rumors. And she knows him like she knows the back of her hand, or the floorboard underneath her bed she stashes the picture and the ring under, or the books she’s read in the middle of the night when she was supposed to be asleep, the ones they tried to hide from her so she couldn’t read his name. She knows. 

(One of the older chaperones told her—or muttered disparagingly in her direction after Beatrice asked the same question for a whole hour one day, because no one would give her a straight answer—that she has the analytical eyes of her mother and the stubborn streak of her namesake and the brazen attitude of her uncle. Another one told her later, a little more kindly, that she looks like her father when she reads, quiet and studious. So, she _knows_.) 

Her backpack is a heavy weight on her back as she creeps through the downstairs rooms, her shoes gripped in one hand and a letter almost crumpled tight in the other. She’d written it after dinner, tucked away in a corner of a room that no one ever looked in (the bathroom closet, of course), the typewriter across her lap and the news still fresh in her mind. She tapped her fingers against the keys. How should she address the letter? Because she’d have to send a letter. It was only polite, after all. But calling him _uncle_ outright might be a little too much, a little too soon. _Dear_ , she typed, for a start. _Dear_ —physically distant relative? Closest living relative? The person she had to find, because he could help her find the people most important to her? This had to be _perfect_ , and Beatrice knew it would be, but she still had to think— 

_Dear Sir_ , she settled on, with a small, pleased smile. 

That was when she’d heard the voices from outside in the hall, filtering through the bathroom door. 

“This can’t be good news,” said a chaperone Beatrice never liked. “He’s a wanted criminal, isn’t he? And I heard he was responsible for that other fire a few years ago, too. What if he comes here?”

“How can we trust someone like him?” said another one that Beatrice had almost respected until that moment. 

“It’s probably not even him,” said a third voice. “There’s been too many people with his initials showing up over the years. With any luck, he’s dead and gone.”

Beatrice frowned, mostly in anger, because that was such an awful, rude thing to say about someone. She knew it was him. There was no way it couldn’t be. But the chaperones had a point about the initials, and it made her think of something else. In case the letter went astray, because the mail could be so unreliable, especially so far from the city, she should preface it with something, shouldn’t she? 

_I have no way of knowing if this letter will reach you, as the distance between us is so very far and so very troublesome_ , she’d written, proud at how professional she sounded. _And even if this letter does reach you, I am not sure it will reach the right person. Perhaps you are not who I think you are_.

But she’d learned one important thing here, and that was that you had to be certain, because you might be wrong. So at the end of the day, it was merely a pretense, a formality. There was nothing she didn’t know for sure, because she was certain.

 _My name is Beatrice Baudelaire_ , she typed, with a fierce determination and her head held high. _I am searching for my family_. Then she’d known that she was going to leave. 

Beatrice squints up at the grandfather clock in the corner of the main room, trying to see the time through the shadows. If she cuts it too close she’ll run into the chaperones doing their middle-of-the-night check on the neophytes. She has to be out of the building before it comes to that. The ground floor of headquarters is silent as a grave right now, as dark as one too, and she steps close to the couch where the floor won’t talk back to her as she makes her way to the heavy ivory front door, washed grey in the dark. 

She knows from experience—from carefully watching and listening—that the door is locked (silver, outdated, the kind from the old hardware manuals Beatrice has extensively studied in the dead of night) from the outside, the volunteer who locks it then running up the fire escape and back inside through an upstairs window. But the quickest way out is always the easiest way in. She puts on her shoes and takes off her backpack, unzips the latter as slow as she can, and feels around for the thin red ribbon. 

She shifts her hair, shoulder-length and blonde with a curl at the very end, away from her face, and ties it back securely with the ribbon. 

An older volunteer had given her a lock pick the previous week after Beatrice helped her solve a word game—there’s no way she would’ve been able to get one otherwise. The chaperones almost always seem to know when someone’s doing something they shouldn’t, considering how much else they miss. Beatrice takes it out and gets to work, moving quickly and quietly, listening for the barely audible _tick_ when one of the tumblers releases. One of the chaperones laughs upstairs, a disembodied thing in the darkness, and Beatrice grips the tools harder so she doesn’t jump and drop them. 

The lock clicks sharply, the door easing open with a heavy creak. Beatrice freezes in place, straining her ears, her breath still in her throat. She’s sure someone had to hear that. 

Something creaks upstairs. 

_The floorboard outside the chaperone’s door._

Beatrice snatches up her bag, squeezes herself through the gap and outside, and pulls the door shut behind her. She runs down the stone steps two at a time and doesn’t look back.

 

Ten blocks away, when she’s sure no one is looking, Beatrice drops the folded letter into a public mailbox. 

 

The only train out of town leaves at five in the morning. Beatrice gets to the station with plenty of time to spare, and easily memorizes the route she’ll have to take to get to the city. It’s a long one, so she sits down on one of the benches and counts out her change. She digs the ring out of her bag, the heirloom from the island Sunny had given her that Beatrice had hid from the chaperones, and tries it on different fingers until it stays and doesn’t slide. Then she waits, tracing the low ceiling beams with her eyes, swinging her legs back and forth. 

She knows just what he’ll be like. Not too tall, keeps to himself, intelligent. Sensible, maybe a little tentative, a little worried. His books made it sound like he’d been through a lot, after all. But she’s not too concerned about that. He’ll talk to her, because she’s his niece, and she’s read everything he’s written, and they have a good deal in common. They both like big words, long books, and could take or leave the sea. 

She has one picture of him, of the side of his back and a corner of his face and one hand, or the side of the back and the corner of a face and the one hand of a man Violet and Klaus didn’t know, but a man Beatrice knew couldn’t be anyone else. There were three other people in the photograph—the uncle she’ll never meet, and the Baudelaire parents. 

Beatrice hadn’t meant to take the photograph. It was their photograph, Violet and Klaus and Sunny’s, the last thing they had of their parents. But she thought it might be the only glimpse she’d get of her uncle, especially when she’d only known about Jacques, so she would sneak it out of Klaus’s commonplace book when he wasn’t looking. She’d wonder who the other man was, since that was before she knew. And she’d meant to put it back, but—but there hadn’t been time. 

Violet and Klaus told her her mother had blue eyes, and so did Jacques, and she has them too, so she knows she’ll see the same shade of blue in his eyes, another link between the two of them. Excitement flutters around inside of her like a million wonderful butterflies, and she can’t help but smile. Not only is she going to find the family she lost, she’s going to find the family she didn’t even know she still had until a few months before. Beatrice can’t think of anything luckier. 

 

There’s not too many people on the train when it comes into the station, so Beatrice picks a windowseat all to herself, pressing herself close so she can see everything passing by. She doesn’t want to miss a single thing. She swings her legs again, heels kicking the seat, and waits for the train to start moving. 

“Aren’t you a little young to be traveling alone?” the woman across the aisle asks. She lowers yesterday’s evening edition newspaper and gives Beatrice a pointed stare behind her thick-framed glasses. 

“No,” Beatrice says. 

“You seem a little young,” the woman continues. 

“I’m short for my age,” Beatrice says. 

The woman gives her another look, specifically at her feet, and then looks back up at Beatrice with a raised eyebrow. She ruffles her newspaper imperiously and disappears behind it again. 

Beatrice swallows, her shoulders pulling in. She makes a point to stop swinging her legs and sits up straighter. She keeps at it, even when the woman gets off at the next station and she’s by herself on the train. 

 

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she jolts awake at a flash of light across her face. It flickers jagged on her hands, lighting up the seat beneath her, bright and blinding white. She looks around frantically, expecting to see rain and bending wood, to hear the roar of crashing waves, before she remembers she’s still on the train. There’s no lightning on a train. It’s just the sun streaming in from the window. She watches with wide eyes as it creates patterns on her arms and her dress, then tears her gaze away and stares hard at the faraway houses outside the window instead, clutching her bag in her lap. Beatrice thinks of big words ( _pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity_ surely counts as a word, and she spends ten minutes testing out pronunciations), long books ( _Anna Karenina_ is long, and she can probably still read it even though she already knows the central theme), and anything but the sea, until her hands loosen and her shoulders drop and the sun is high enough that she can’t see it. 

 

Beatrice had first found his name buried in old reports, in thirteen files jammed into the back of a drawer, down in the basement at headquarters when someone had asked her to find a flashlight. She found a bat instead, clinging to the rafters, and it blinked at her with big, black eyes. Beatrice blinked back, because she knew all about all kinds of animals, especially the ones the organization trained, and she didn’t mind bats. Then it fluttered down on top of an old filing cabinet in the corner. 

Beatrice wandered over and picked out faded letters that spelled _Baudelaire_ on the front. Eager, because no one at headquarters would talk to her about Violet or Klaus or Sunny, or answer her questions about where they might be, she yanked it open and found files and files with a distinct cursive signature ending each one— _Lemony Snicket_. And her stomach had twisted up tight, because she could hear Klaus like he was standing right behind her, telling her the name _Kit Snicket_. 

_Kit Snicket_ , Beatrice had echoed. 

_That’s right_ , Klaus had said, smiling. _She was your mother_. 

Beatrice knew all about her mother. Violet and Klaus and Sunny had told her her mother was a good person, a _volunteer_ , someone who had helped them, and they had helped her. That was how Beatrice was born. And she knew all about Jacques, because they’d said the same thing about him. But they’d never mentioned a Lemony. She knew better than to think he was her father, because she knew her father’s name, too. _Dewey Denouement_. They’d said his name only once, and she’d repeated it over and over again to herself. Beatrice didn’t know who this was. 

She read through them all in the dead of night so no one would bother her, because Beatrice knew they were watching her, closer than they watched the other neophytes. She tried to find the four volumes she’d found hints at in other files, although she never managed to pin them down. But the thirteen files told her enough. They confirmed that Violet and Klaus and Sunny were still out there somewhere, just like she thought. They confirmed their stories, although with other details they hadn’t said or had relayed differently—but Beatrice had never doubted what they’d told her to begin with. 

And they confirmed that Lemony Snicket was her uncle, and he was alive. 

All of Beatrice’s hopes became real, became fact. There was someone _else_ out there, someone who could help her. Someone who was family. Someone who could help her find Violet and Klaus and Sunny. Someone who knew the whole story too. 

So then she just had to wait. She had to wait, and learn, and sit through someone telling her how to make a meringue when she knew full well how to make a meringue, and how to pick a lock and how to define a word and the right way to escape a burning building. She had to keep waiting until the right moment came and she could leave and try to find him, try to find them all. And Beatrice would know when it was. She was Beatrice Baudelaire, after all. She knew everything now. 

 

Beatrice spends three weeks switching trains, eating greasy sandwiches from the vendors hanging around in the old, dingy train stations. Sunny wouldn’t like any of the sandwiches at all, but Beatrice has to make do with what she can. No one talks to her, so she doesn’t get a chance to try out any of the other things she’d thought to say after she spoke to that woman. _I’m visiting a relative_. _I’m in a special program_. _Didn’t anyone ever tell_ you _not to talk to strangers_? She’s a little bummed about that, because she practiced the perfect eyebrow raise in the hand mirror she took from one of the chaperones, but it’s really for the best. She doesn’t need to be sidetracked. 

Instead, she listens to how the trains sound smoother and sleeker closer to the city, watches how the stations get more impressive. She takes pamphlets from each station until she has a neat collection detailing train mechanics, local restaurants, and sometimes, if she finds one, the smallest books she’s ever seen. Beatrice sits in the hard station seats and flips through them while she waits for her train to come in. Mostly they’re books she’s read before, but she thinks they’re cute, being so tiny. She’ll show them to Violet and Klaus and Sunny, and her uncle, too. She knows they’ll enjoy them. 

A voice mumbles indistinct static over the loudspeaker. Beatrice finishes her sandwich, puts the latest brochure in her bag, and gets on the next train. 

 

The train station in the city is _enormous_ , bigger than headquarters. It certainly looks as old as headquarters, but a little more distinguished, with a solid white floor and an endlessly high ceiling. Beatrice would be able to appreciate it more, she thinks, if there wasn’t so many people, all bustling past in a flurry of suitcases and elbows. None of them spare her a second glance, not even when she climbs up on top of one of the curved benches for a better view of the entire station.

Whenever Violet couldn’t figure out how to fix an invention, or Klaus couldn’t figure out the meaning of a sentence, or Sunny couldn’t figure out how to change a recipe, they would take it apart and look at each individual component before continuing. The same principle works for a city, Beatrice figures. A city is just a collection of streets, one right after the other, and all of them go somewhere. It’s not too hard to find out where, especially when you have the right map. 

She finally spots the map display, drops back onto the floor, and goes and grabs every single map available. She squeezes her way through the crowd mobbing around the exit and emerges out on the city street into a sudden deluge of bright lights and noise. Beatrice blinks until it all evens out, all the traffic lights and towering buildings and the _people_ , hundreds and hundreds _more_ of them. She swallows, presses herself against the outside wall, and takes a moment to watch everything. 

It’s strange. The ocean was vast, and they rarely ran into anyone out there, and headquarters, tucked away in a small town miles from the sea, had only about twenty neophytes and a handful of teachers and chaperones. But the city is full of jostling bodies and constant sound, like the whole world rushing around her, a storm that doesn’t stop. Beatrice thinks she might be scared, if she wasn’t so systematic about it. You can’t be scared if you know everything. It’s just different, is all it is. She reminds herself to breathe and thinks it’s just different. 

Beatrice spreads the maps out in the park across the street, holding the edges down with rocks so they don’t blow away when the breeze kicks up. Everything is marked on the maps, every street and building and corner store, and even the best places to see certain birds. One map includes _Nine Dreary Buildings to Avoid on Your Lunch Break_ , which is absurdly specific but exactly what she needs, and Beatrice hunts them all down with a careful eye and a black pen. All nine buildings are within a few blocks of each other, clustered in the center of the city. She’ll have to go through all of them, just to be sure. Klaus taught her it was good to be thorough. She puts the rest of the maps away and starts looking. 

The first two buildings are too short to have a thirteenth floor. The third building looks like it was condemned years ago and no one bothered to do anything with it. The fourth building has so many floors that Beatrice loses track when she stands on the sidewalk and tilts her head back to try and count, and she looks through the directory inside the doors but doesn’t see any mention of her uncle’s name (or a pseudonym, or an anagram, or even just a suspicious blank space). 

The walk to the fifth building takes the longest, because Beatrice has to find a path around the construction being done on seventh street, and takes ten minutes to wrestle with the map and figure out which street she’s on when she winds up in a dark alley with a lot of cigarette butts and one very noisy pigeon who tries to steal her map. The sixth building has the suspicious blank space on the directory, but it’s on the fifteenth floor. The seventh and eighth buildings, when she manages to find them, were mislabeled and wind up being two different diners, one of them even across from a completely different train station. Beatrice admits that they’re still pretty dreary-looking and uncomfortable, especially the latter one. She certainly wouldn’t want to eat at a place called The Hemlock Tearoom and Stationary Shop. That’s just tempting fate a little too much. 

The ninth building proclaims itself to be the Rhetorical Building in faded but still distinct black print on an otherwise grey building, with a tattered brown awning over the glass double doors. It’s definitely tall enough to have thirteen floors—Beatrice counts twenty rows of windows going up the side. She bites her lip and scans the directory. Her heart leaps when she spots the little card for an office on the thirteenth floor. The name is scribbled out, but whoever did it used a faded black pen and didn’t do that good a job, so she can still see the very clear _L_ at the beginning and the _S_ somewhere in the middle. She bites her lip around a smile. 

This is _it_. This is her uncle’s office. 

Beatrice pushes the doors open and takes a cursory glance around the lobby, and finds the inside lives up to the dreary reputation too. She wouldn’t have put so much sagging grey furniture and scuffed flooring and wilted potted plants in an office building. She ducks down as she hurries past the front desk so the bored receptionist doesn’t see her, vaguely wondering what it is about the building that her uncle likes so much to have an office here, and heads up the staircase. She can ask him when she sees him. She can ask him everything when she sees him, although everything is just one single question, but it’s everything to her. 

The thirteen floors pass in what feels like a matter of moments, and Beatrice breaks into a run when she gets closer to his office, bursting through the doors onto the thirteenth floor. She darts from door to door, looking for the right number, wood creaking under her shoes, and almost barrels right into a panel of old, frosted glass on a door halfway down the hall. The only writing on it says _DETECTIVE_ in peeling letters, which is exactly what she expected. Beatrice grins and knocks a few times, bouncing on the balls of her feet. When there’s no answer right away, she tries the doorknob. 

The door is unlocked.

Beatrice tries with everything she has to contain her excitement, but it still comes through in her shaking hands as she turns the doorknob. “Hello?” she calls. 

She comes face to face with a cloud of dust. Beatrice coughs into her fist, waving her other hand around to disperse it, and looks up to find a cluttered, but empty office. 

Beatrice frowns and walks inside. The blinds are shut tight over the windows, so she eases them open carefully, letting in just enough light to see, and the office still doesn’t have anyone else in it. She checks under the desk, and out on the fire escape, and even under the papers on the walls, but there’s no reasonably tall man with her eyes waiting for her. She huffs out a sigh, her shoulders falling, but then the papers on the wall catch her attention. She looks closer. 

They aren’t just papers—there are photographs mixed in, pictures of people she’s never seen before, and pictures of places, cities, hotel rooms, at least one rental car office, an all-you-can-eat buffet, and two separate theaters, and newspaper articles and pages ripped from books, all framing a humongous map of the city and surrounding areas, bigger than any she picked up at the train station. The papers are connected by a thin red string, wound around tacks and marking pins and what looks like an old bottle cap for a soda Beatrice doesn’t think sounds very pleasing. The middle of the map has more recent ones, polaroids dated a few months back of steep, rolling hills, a note paperclipped to one, neat typewriter type proclaiming _it could be possible_ , underlined in a smooth, even blue pen. There’s a path marked beside them, curving through a wide and unlabeled space in the map. 

_That must be it_ , she thinks, nodding to herself. He’s not here, and she could be more upset about that, but she can’t be when now she knows exactly where he went. He’s pretty obvious for a detective, which makes her smile around a laugh. 

She turns to the desk, which leans a little to one side, papers and a typewriter balanced precariously. A strangely-shaped paperweight sits on top of a stack of papers, and Beatrice mentally runs through every single animal she knows but can’t find a match. It looks like a snake or a worm or an eel, only with too many teeth. 

Beatrice clambers up into the chair behind the desk, settles herself, and looks at the typewriter. It’s an old model, but well-cared-for, with shiny keys and a brand new ribbon, almost like it was waiting for her. Beatrice rolls in a sheet of paper, and then runs her fingers over the keys. She’s sure he won’t mind.

 _Dear Sir_ , she types. _I am writing this on the typewriter in your small, dusty office, on the thirteenth floor of one of the nine dreariest buildings of the city._

_I am leaving this city, only hours after seeing it for the first time, to follow your path of yarn and pins. I am heading for the hills…_

 

When she leaves his office and starts hunting through the bus schedules for an idea of how she’s going to get to the hills, she realizes, with an exhilarated jump of her stomach, that it’s now March 1st. She’s been nine years old for a whole day.

On her last birthday on the boat, which Violet had radically modified before leaving the island and on the journey after, Sunny made her a cake. There were no candles, because none of them ever used a candle, at least when Beatrice was looking, and Violet and Klaus read her favorite story, and everyone got icing all over their hands and faces. Beatrice can just barely hear the way they all laughed. There’s a thin fog over the rest of the memory, one that strangles the excitement out of her. She can’t quite recall what the weather was like, or what she wore, or what flavor the cake was or even what the story was and especially how close it was to the day where— 

Beatrice clears her throat and looks back at the bus schedules. She doesn’t think _I have to find them_. She thinks _I will find them_. 

 

Beatrice takes one look at the sandwich counter in the bus station and resolutely decides she’s too hungry for another sad, uncomfortably greasy sandwich, and she needs a much better option. She takes out her map and backtracks to the Rhetorical Building, because the closest diner is on that street, right across from the office, between a tailor shop and a building shaped almost like a short, squat pen. For a city that on the whole is a lot more dreary than she thought it’d be, the diner looks bright and welcoming, with soft lights in the windows and cheerful blue curtains. Klaus taught her to be aware of her surroundings, so she makes sure she looks at everything when she steps inside. 

The diner isn’t very big, but it’s clean and well-kept, with tan booths against either wall, a line of square tables right down the middle, and a counter blocking most of the kitchen from view. The pictures on the walls are all framed and organized in neat rows, and Beatrice’s gaze moves quickly from the few pictures of an ocean and a group of people in front of a boat to the other ones of cityscapes, and then to a completely blank piece of paper with _#47!_ scribbled in the lower right corner. She looks to the other side of the room and finds a tightly-packed bookshelf near the counter. She thinks Klaus would definitely approve. 

She climbs up on top of one of the counter stools and smooths out her skirt, and then sees a tall man standing behind the counter, flipping an oozing sandwich on the grill. He looks at her with wide eyes, surprise clear on his face, but then he smiles, so genuine she could’ve just imagined the shock. Beatrice thinks he looks a little like a movie star, with that thick red hair and easy stance.

“What can I get you?” he asks. 

“I don’t have much money,” Beatrice says, because Violet always taught her to be honest. Sunny taught her to lie, but she thinks Sunny would like this man too, if she saw that sandwich. 

“Not a problem,” the man says. “It’s on the house. What do you like?”

“What are you making?” 

“The best grilled cheese you’ll ever eat in your life,” he says, and he slides the sandwich onto a plate and sets it in front of her. Then he puts a napkin and a glass of water beside it and smiles expectantly. 

It _is_ the best grilled cheese she’s ever eaten in her life. It puts the millions of sandwiches she ate at all those train stations to shame. When the cheese pulls when she takes a bite out of it, she knows that Sunny would _love_ this sandwich. It seems almost unfair to get it for free. “Are you sure it’s okay?” she asks through a mouthful of toasted bread and mozzarella and a hint of pepper. 

“Tell you what,” he says, wiping his hands on his apron. “Have you read anything good lately? My friends and I are always looking for book recommendations.” 

She wishes she could get everything in life with a good book recommendation, because that sounds like a great system. The last book she’d read had been back at headquarters, so that she would understand a certain code, but Beatrice liked it a lot anyway. She was told it was a classic too, and she knows lots of adults like it when you read classics. “I read a book about a girl who goes out to dinner with her family,” she says, “and cracks an egg on her forehead. Not at the dinner, in a different chapter.” 

He laughs. “A friend of mine liked that one when we were kids,” he says. “She went around trying to crack an egg on her forehead too, made me go through a whole carton of eggs.” 

“Did she do it?”

“She sure did. Got egg all over my aunt’s diner in the process, but she looked me right in the eye and told me it was worth it.”

Someone else sits down farther down the counter, and the man walks off in their direction, leaving Beatrice alone with the grilled cheese. But he comes back, a curious look in his eyes. “So what brings you to the city?” he asks. 

She thinks this is the question where she shouldn’t be entirely honest. Beatrice sits up straighter in her seat, trying to pull the sandwich apart into smaller, more dignified bites, the cheese oozing. “I’m visiting a relative,” she says. 

“A relative?” 

“A relative,” she says. “That’s all.” 

“Do you need any help?” he asks. “I know this city like the back of my hand, and I’d be happy to—”

“No,” Beatrice says. “I know what I’m doing.” She finishes the last of the grilled cheese and wipes her hand on the napkin. “Thank you very much.” 

He frowns a little, like he wants to ask her something else, but then he settles on another smile. “If you’re ever in the area,” he says, “or you need anything, even just some good food, stop on by.” 

“What’s your name?” she asks. 

“Jake Hix.” 

“Beatrice Baudelaire.” 

 

The only thing about the journey into the hills that Beatrice didn’t account for is all the open space. 

The bus driver only takes her as far as a convenience store on the outskirts of the city, so Beatrice walks the nearby dirt roads out into the hills, stopping at the first sight of open, empty land. She grips the straps of her backpack, standing at the edge of the misty and faded earth spread out all around her, reaching on and on and on, sloping down at dangerous angles before disappearing completely in a thick haze. She swallows hard and stares even harder. 

Beatrice focuses on the color. Even in late winter, it’s green, pale but distinctly green. They’re hills, not the ocean, with a horizon blurred white with fog and clouds. Nothing is a dangerous, roiling blue-black-grey, and the tall crests of the hills don’t move like waves, and nothing rushes through her ears like a scream, except the wind, which is much less thunderous than water. After all that, it’s almost silent, in the hills. It’s silent, and it’s not _all_ that open, is it? There’s at least two scraggly little trees that she can see. Landmarks. Points of reference. She is not alone in the hills. 

He’s out there, somewhere. 

She starts walking. 

 

Without the train schedules for something to keep track of, Beatrice isn’t sure how long she spends in the hills. Time passes in cool nights and cloudy days and an awful lot of grass with actually very few trees before, in a low valley in the hills, she reaches an encampment of about thirty shepherds. Beyond them, where she expects sheep, is an impressive collection of yaks. They might be the only people she runs into out here, and she’s starting to get worried, not so much that she won’t find her uncle, but that she’ll overlook him completely in all this space. The path on the map in his office was pretty vague. She’s going to have to ask them. 

Beatrice approaches one of the shepherds. He looks like he’s the oldest, his wild and white beard tangling in the wind. He holds a thick, dark bell in one hand, his elbow propped against a sturdy walking stick, and watches Beatrice with startlingly cold eyes as she approaches. 

“Excuse me,” Beatrice says. “Have you seen a man around here?” 

“Depends,” he says. His voice rumbles like deep thunder, and it makes her flinch. “What’s he look like?”

Beatrice thinks about it. “Average height, not bald, fully clothed, answers to the initials L.S.” 

“Oh,” the shepherd says, straightening up. “Him! He was here for a while. A strange one. Kept to himself most of the time. Stayed in that cave about two miles away.” He rings the bell, and the sound clunks and thunks against her ears. The yaks in the distance raise their heads and gaze in his direction. The shepherd, meanwhile, looks back at her with a raised eyebrow. “Seemed like he might have been waiting for someone, I thought.”

She feels a twinge of guilt and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She should’ve gotten here _faster_. “Can you take me there, please?” she asks. 

“I don’t do anything for free,” he says shortly. 

“I don’t have much,” she says, frowning, and it’s more true now than it was when she told it to Jake Hix. Between all the train fare and the subpar sandwiches and then the cost of the bus, Beatrice figures she has maybe seventy-five cents. 

The shepherd bends down, sweeping a critical eye over Beatrice. When his gaze finds her hands, he points at the little band around one of her fingers. “That,” he says. “That would do.” 

“Oh,” Beatrice says. She looks down at the ring, dull in the lack of sunlight. She’s seen it sparkle beautiful gold and red, the carving of the initial in the stone glittering brighter than anything. Something lost, something that was found again after so much time. Beatrice likes wearing it, even though she doesn’t always think about it. 

But it’s not like it _is_ a family heirloom, for her mother or her father or for Violet and Klaus and Sunny. It belonged to the Duchess of Winnipeg, and although it found its way through her family anyway, it’s certainly never really been Beatrice’s. She just thought that she’d be able to give it back to the Duchess at some point. 

She slides the ring off her finger and holds it up for the shepherd. His beard parts in a smile, revealing awfully shiny teeth, and he snatches the ring up and drops it into his pocket. The yaks are closer now, and he winds his hand into the rope around one of their necks and drags it over. He climbs up onto its back and stares at Beatrice. “It’s a ride. You’d best get on.” 

Beatrice pulls herself up behind him. She tracks the sun this time, over the huge shoulders of the shepherd, watching it dip through the sky as they ride.

“Did he say anything?” Beatrice asks at one point. “The man.” 

The shepherd scratches at his chin. His elbow swings back as he does, jostling into Beatrice’s ear. “Something about a root beer float,” he says. “I’m in the mood for a root beer float.”

“That seems a lot to ask, in the hills,” Beatrice says, tilting her head to the side to avoid the elbow. “The closest diner is back in the city.” 

“No, that’s what _he_ said. _I’m in the mood for a root beer float_.” 

“Oh,” Beatrice says, feeling her face flush. 

“Well, there you go,” the shepherd says, some time later when he stops in front of a low but deep cave jutting awkwardly out of the earth. Beatrice thanks him, slides down off the yak, and makes her way inside. 

There’s nothing much in the cave—just a few sheets of loose, stained paper, and a whole lot of bats, almost indistinguishable from the shadows. They squeak when Beatrice gets too close, so she leaves them alone in the back and focuses on the rest of the cave. A few sheets of peeling and faded flower-patterned wallpaper cling to the curved walls. A collection of wires sits near the mouth of the cave, and a lone light bulb rolls by her feet. The wind collects in the hollow at the center, making it drafty and uncomfortable. She pulls her sweater tighter around her. 

From the shepherd’s words, she knew he wouldn’t be here, but it still stings to get all the way here and then find out he’s gone again, to find out she just missed him. But that just means she has to try again, try harder. That’s not a problem for her. She’s been through worse. 

Beatrice rifles through the sheets of paper left behind. She picks out the least ruined one, the only mark a _K_ by a ripped corner. She pulls out a pen and sits down. 

_Dear Sir_ , she writes. _I have found you at last—but you’re not here._

 

She finishes her letter and folds it neatly. She didn’t bring a single envelope, and she looks around in her bag to find something else she could possibly trade for the shepherd to send her letter. She doesn’t think he’ll care for a sweater or her lock pick, and she needs them. Beatrice walks out of the cave, staring into the direction of the city. She can’t quite see it, but she’s sure it’s there, just as sure as she is that she’ll find her uncle when she gets back. 

She starts to figure out how she’ll get back, because she can worry about the letter when she finds the shepherd. How long it’ll take to get out of the hills, where to catch the right bus, how she can find the diner—when one of the younger shepherds, not much older than her, trots over, tugging a yak behind him. 

“The city’s a long ways away,” he says when he stops beside her, panting a little. “I think your best bet is this yak here.” 

Beatrice stares at him, and then the yak. The yak yawns at her. 

“He’s pretty comfortable,” the boy says, smiling. “And he’s got a good sense of direction. The best yak this side of the hills, I guarantee it.” 

“What about the other side?” Beatrice asks. 

The boy laughs. “No comparison at all.” 

“Don’t you need him?” 

He shakes his head. “I can make do without him for a while.” 

He tells her he’s heard about a shortcut back to the city, through a mountain rather than the miles of rolling hills. Beatrice has never been on a mountain. When he points it out to her, an enormous shimmering outline through the fog, it’s the most amazing thing she’s ever seen in her life. It looks _nothing_ like the ocean. 

 

The mountain is dangerously uneven, but Beatrice has never been so high up before, and that and the yak make up for all the sudden dips and drops in the path. The yak seems to know where he’s going—she never has to keep him on track or nudge him along, and he always stops around sunset and lets her curl up against his side. Sometimes he stops in front of the occasional bush, and Beatrice makes sure she can identify the berries on them with what Klaus wrote in his commonplace book, and the two of them snack to keep up their strength, Beatrice making sure not to stain the edges of the notebook with juice fingerprints. 

Sometimes she flips back, back to when Klaus was a few years older than her, to the page where she’d taken the photograph. She’d replaced it when both the objects became hers. She likes reading what he wrote, the little bits of her family’s story, like he’s right beside her on this mountain even as he was trying to get through the Mortmain Mountains. Recipes Sunny put together, things Violet said, pieces of codes and books and memories. 

The notebook was the last thing he gave her. He’d thrown it at her during the shipwreck, and she can still see that, plain as anything. The black clouds and the thunder and the lightning, the wood splintering up in a roaring crash under her feet, everything slick with the endless rain and the thick, dark waves, including the edge of wood keeping Beatrice afloat. Then Violet’s voice, shouting _we’ll find you, I promise—_

Beatrice pages through the notebook, staring at Klaus’s immaculate handwriting. “How much more mountain do you think there is?” she asks the yak. 

 

There’s a lot more mountain, days and days of mountain. Beatrice promises herself that if she ever has to do this again, she’s bringing a calendar. 

 

When she gets to the bottom of the mountain, the ground covered in rocks and patchy grass, still a ways out from the city but definitely closer to it than the spot where the bus had dropped her off, Beatrice isn’t sure what to do with the yak. She climbs down, dusts him off, readjusts her bag, and then watches him. The yak watches her. Then he yawns, turns, and starts meandering back in the direction of the hills. She figures he probably wouldn’t be the best yak this side of the hills if he didn’t know how to get back to the shepherd. 

“Bye,” Beatrice calls. 

The city is uncomfortably close when she gets back, full of a heavy, simmering summer heat. She wipes the sweat off her face and thinks she could also go for a root beer float right about now. But there's probably a lot more diners than dreary office buildings in the city, ones that will be harder to eliminate than the offices were. She's not even sure if he'll be in his office now either, after he wasn’t where he was supposed to be in the hills. The thought sits in a knot inside her, twisting up the more she thinks. She of all people should know where he is. What sort of person is she, if she doesn't know the whereabouts of her own uncle? 

Beatrice winds her way carefully through the masses of people still crowding the sidewalks, as if they never left, like the same people from months ago have been standing around here all this time. She could pull out the maps, but she doesn’t see a place to put them down and look at them again. Beatrice finally comes to a halt in front of a square, stocky building, old pillars framing the tinted glass doors. 

Violet and Klaus and Sunny told her about libraries. She doesn’t remember the one on the island, or the island itself, although Violet told her both were massive, and they didn’t have much of one on the boat, just a collection of books Klaus brought from the island. But Beatrice knows that a library is a sanctuary, a calm place, where someone is supposed to feel safe. She knows that her uncle considers a library all of those things too. And even if she doesn’t find anything, at least it’s probably air conditioned. 

Beatrice heads inside. 

The first thing she notices is that everything is so quiet. But not an unnaturally still quiet, more of a gentle, unobtrusive one, interrupted only by the occasional shuffle of paper. Beatrice understands with a rush what Violet and Klaus and Sunny meant. It’s like stepping into a whole world, one she could spend hours and hours in just reading, among the bookshelves and pale cream carpet and broad windows letting in a sunlight so serene that for the first time it doesn’t make her hands clench in fear. 

Beatrice takes her time going through the library, taking it all in. She makes her way through aisle after aisle, down a staircase to the lower level. A short wall separates the little lobby near the staircase and the rest of the floor, and she follows it around where it curves to look at the room. 

Her breath catches in her throat. Ten feet ahead, there’s a man standing in front of a glass case, his hands deep in the pockets of his suit jacket. Beatrice walks a little closer, staying against the wall, until she can see the plaque near the case, describing something about poetry and actresses and dedication to the theater. She can see herself in the glass, a distorted short reflection in a pale pink dress, and she smooths her hair on instinct. Beatrice looks up, and up, until she can see the sharp reflection of the man, blue eyes and dark hair and a suitcase beside him that has seen better days but still clearly proclaims the owner to have the initials _L.S_. 

Beatrice ducks back behind the wall in her surprise, her hands gripping each other. _What are you doing_ , she thinks frantically, her heart pounding and pounding. _There he is!_

But when she pushes herself away from the wall, her mouth open to call out to him, he’s gone. Her heart drops, and she rushes towards the glass case. She skims through the poem for a hint about anything, as he seemed to look at it with a great deal of concentration, but she stops at the line _a word which here means “person who trains bats”_ because who writes a second verse with such an uneven rhythm, and there’s no way _baticeer_ is really a word—then she hears quick footsteps thudding in the hall behind her. She turns and runs towards then. 

Beatrice follows him outside, barely keeping up. He runs incredibly fast for a man of his age in this heat, whatever that age is. Beatrice knows it’s certainly much older than she is. She sees the edge of his hat, the corner of his suitcase winging around another street, and she keeps running. It’s him. She’s going to catch up with him.

She follows him to a nearby park, where she finds him yards away of her, almost collapsed on a bench, leaning to the side to examine something on the seat. Beatrice slows up. And then he’s on his feet again, strolling towards the lake. There’s something forced about his casual stance, and she picks up her pace, thinking somewhere inside that this is ridiculous. They’re both looking for each other, they’re both _here_ , and she should just— 

He bolts off, this time leaping with an unexpected agility over a patch of shrubbery, which Beatrice dodges around easily when she reaches it, tearing out of the park after him. Moments later, she sees him throwing himself into a bus one street up, disappearing completely when the doors snap shut. 

Beatrice lets out a disbelieving groan, staring at the retreating bus. She can’t believe how _difficult_ he’s being, or for what reason, or why he treats the city like a place he’s desperately trying to escape. For as much as he runs, he sure still seems to wind up back here eventually. 

But now that she’s seen him, she knows exactly where he’s going. Where else would he go in the city, on this particular bus route? Beatrice has looked over all the maps, and she remembers exactly where to go. She wipes the sweat off her face, takes a breath, and keeps on going. 

He still makes it to his office building before her. When Beatrice stops at the corner, clutching the nearby lamppost and gasping, the bus is already far down the street and he’s nowhere in sight. She swallows and heads for the Rhetorical Building. 

The lobby is dreadfully cold and still dreadfully dreary, but she barely notices it this time. Beatrice bypasses everything and sprints right for the staircase, not even trying to hide.

It could be because she’s already run so much, but taking the staircase this time seems to take an eternity. She’s so sure she can hear him, wheezing a floor above her, and that pushes her forward when her lungs burn and her legs ache. She makes it to the thirteenth floor, flings the door open, and barrels down the hallway to his office door. 

Beatrice tries the doorknob first, but it doesn’t yield. She pounds on the door for five whole minutes, and it rattles and shakes but no one opens it. 

One of the doors further down the hallway opens, and a man sticks his head out. “Something I can help you with?” he calls. “I’ve never seen anyone open that door at all. Can I—”

“Thank you,” Beatrice says quickly, hoping she sounds more firm than out of breath, “but I have this under control.” The man shrugs and closes the door. Beatrice continues knocking and knocking. 

_Maybe you were wrong_ , a voice in her head whispers. _Maybe it’s not him._

 _I’m not wrong_ , Beatrice tells herself. _I’m not wrong._

She huffs out a sigh, drops her backpack on the floor, and pulls out the lock pick. She doesn’t want to pick the lock, but this is _it_ , she’s not waiting anymore. 

The lock springs easily. Beatrice jams the picks back into her bag, grips the doorknob, and hauls the door open. 

The office is empty. 

Beatrice gapes around at the office, almost incredulous. It looks different than it did before—the papers, notes, and photographs on the wall are new, linked by a thick blue yarn now. The typewriter has a sheet of paper sticking out of it, like someone was just there (and he was, he _was_ just there, she knows he was). There’s a framed picture on the wall of a lighthouse. The curtains are different, stark white and clean and fluttering in the breeze because _the window is open_. 

She runs over to the window, climbing out onto the fire escape. It’s distressingly empty as well. When she grips the railing and leans over to look down the rest of the stairs and into the alley below, she doesn’t find anything at all. She stands there a moment longer, just in case he reappears, her whole body coiled with anticipation. Then another moment, and another, and another after that, until the moments stretch into minutes and her expectations finally die like a doused fire. She pushes herself away from the railing, slides back inside, and slams the window shut. Beatrice glowers at it, then eases it back open. He’ll have to be able to get back in later. 

She takes a look at the wall. Before, it was easy to tell where he was going. Now, Beatrice can’t figure out what any of the notes mean. They’re all scattered pictures of beach sand and close-ups of waves and an unsettling collection of curling, spindly things that look like dried seaweed. She catches a few glimpses of his handwriting, mostly just question marks, and some typewritten notes signed _M_. No matter how hard she tries, her eyes keep finding their way back to the pictures of the ocean, pearly blue and peppered with stark-white foam. Her jaw clenches, and she turns away sharply. 

The desk has more papers on it than it did before, but no paperweight. Beatrice flips through them, but she doesn’t find her letters, or letters from anyone else. What she does find are lists of places she’s never heard of, most of them crossed off. The paper in the typewriter is completely blank, but she doesn’t feel like writing anything. She stares around the office, pointedly avoiding the wall, and tries not to feel too angry or too disappointed. It doesn’t work very well. 

Beatrice walks back into the hallway and shuts the door behind her, frowning down at the floor. She follows him all this way, and she has him, they’re mere feet from each other, and then he leaves? 

_Maybe_ , she thinks, and then she stops, because she’s _not wrong_. It was him, it was, and despite how the decor has changed, this is the office she was in before. He was here, and then he was gone, and so there has to be a reason he’s gone now, a reason to figure out so she can track him down again. Maybe something came up, business, or an enemy, or maybe he was just hungry, or—or— 

_sssssssssshh_. 

Beatrice whirls around and wrenches his office door back open, staring desperately inside. But there’s still no one there. She shuts the door again and looks up and down the hallway. “What was that noise?” she says. 

The door down the hallway opens again, and the same man sticks his head out. “Someone say something?” he asks, gazing at Beatrice. 

“What was that noise?” she asks.

The man shakes his head. “I didn’t hear a noise.”

“I thought I—”

“It was nothing, probably.” He raises an eyebrow. “You know, shouldn’t you be in school?”

“Shouldn’t you be working?” Beatrice shoots back. It’s uncharacteristic of her, but she’s tired all of a sudden, and she doesn’t like how this bone-deep weariness feels. The man looks affronted, and he shuts his door with a loud bang. 

She traipses downstairs, all thirteen floors. Beatrice walks past the old desk and the sad grey furniture and the limp potted plants and makes her way towards the front exit. She’ll just have to wait until he comes back, and she can do that across the street in the diner, where at least she can try to wrangle another sandwich out of Jake Hix. The grilled cheese feels like years ago, after trying to survive on the mountain. 

Beatrice hears it again. 

It’s a scuffle, or like a slither—the drag of a shoe, a split second brush against furniture. 

Beatrice stops in the middle of the lobby, looking around. She only now notices it’s completely empty, the receptionist missing from her desk. A chill ripples down her spine that has nothing to do with the air conditioner. “If it’s nothing,” she says, “then what’s that noise?” 

Something curls slowly around her left ankle, something like thin, calloused fingers, and then a hand clamps tight over her mouth. Beatrice gasps, the sound muffled by the hand. Someone heaves her up, jerking her back into a set of arms, wrenching her close to something dark blue and black. She inhales fabric softener and cotton but the color makes her think of salt and brine and she can’t breathe. She can’t breathe. 

“ _When we drive away in secret_ ,” rasps a woman’s voice in her ear, “ _you’ll be a volunteer. So don’t scream when we take you_ —”

Beatrice grabs at the woman’s hand with both her own. She drags it away from her mouth and manages to gasp, “ _The world is quiet here_!” 

The woman freezes. Beatrice lurches forward, tumbling out of her arms and onto the warped floor with a small shriek and a horrible thud. Beatrice _feels_ horrible, with a red mark around her ankle and her whole body shaking as she stares up at the woman. She doesn’t understand, and that scares her almost as much as the woman. She hadn’t just learned the poem at headquarters, Violet had told her about it, it was something Violet’s parents used to say, but she didn’t—she hadn’t said—Beatrice doesn’t _understand_. 

The woman—tall, in a thin, dark blue sweater, her hair massive and unruly and black—bends down in front of her. Beatrice inches back, trying to catch her breath. 

She squints at Beatrice almost suspiciously. “ _Well, young lady_ ,” she says, “ _have you been good to your mother_?”

 _My mother is dead_ , Beatrice thinks in her panic, and then she forces herself to clear her throat and stop it. “ _The question is_ ,” she pants, “ _has she been good to me_?” 

“You’re a volunteer,” the woman says. 

_No I’m not_. “Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Beatrice Baudelaire,” Beatrice says. 

The woman raises an eyebrow. “Baudelaire?” she repeats, scoffing. “Beatrice _Baudelaire_?” 

Beatrice frowns. “Yes,” she says again. 

“Do you _really_ expect me to believe that?” 

“I do,” Beatrice says, blinking. “It’s the only name I have.” Which isn’t exactly true, but she’s never felt that Snicket suits her all that much. Beatrice Denouement, even, sounds like someone sophisticated, not a short nine-year-old girl with only a fierce determination to her name. Which is still Beatrice Baudelaire, no matter what this woman says. 

The woman straightens up, her face cold, and then she seizes Beatrice’s hand and pulls her roughly to her feet. “You’re coming with me.”

 

Headquarters in the city is a lot different than the one Beatrice was in out in the country. The main difference is that this one is predominately underground, hidden under a two-story library on the corner of a busy street, and seems, from a cursory glance, like it’s going to be harder to sneak out of. They had to walk through a set of locked double doors in the back of the library labeled _Secretarial Department_ , which lead to a long, tunneling hallway devoid of any typewriters, after all. It’s full of sudden dips and the occasional staircase and one long ladder that leads, when Beatrice climbs down it, to the sewers. She focuses hard on the layout, the curves of the passageways, the way the water drips, on the faded signs she can’t read hanging onto the domed walls, so that she’ll stop thinking about the churning in her stomach. 

The path ends in another set of doors, framed in the darkness by flickering torches. Beatrice stumbles to a halt in front of them. 

She’s sure that Violet and Klaus and Sunny, while they were on the island and on the boat, had to have used it. There were things Sunny made that could only have been made on top of something hot, even though Sunny always got that fierce, unreadable look on her face when she talked about what she could remember of fires. But Beatrice never saw it. She never saw flames jumping around each other, spitting in the darkness, smoldering orange turning into dangerous white-hot tongues. 

Beatrice thinks of lightning and wet, foundering wood under her hands. She feels salt in her mouth again.

The woman shoves her through the doors. 

The narrow hallways are bathed in cold, buzzing orange light, an unsettling color against the red brick walls and the hardwood floor. It’s almost claustrophobic, a maze Beatrice can’t parse even when she pays attention. They go up a set of stairs, their footsteps echoing in the silence, and then the woman steers her towards a door around the corner. 

She catches a quick glimpse of the plaque on the door and its unnatural shine— _vice principal_ —before the woman pushes her through it as well. Beatrice finds herself in a cramped, shadowy room, illuminated with one single lamp on the desk, where the outline of a tall man sits, hunched over what looks like a stack of papers. 

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the thin gloom hovering at the edges of the lamp. The shapes on the shelves along the walls sharpen. They look like tea sets, if tea sets were collections of just small, differently-patterned oblong jars, all topped with fragile lids, a handle on either side. 

Beatrice swallows. She never saw what Esmé Squalor was so desperate to find. She wonders if one of the sugar bowls crowding the shelves around her is what she was looking for. 

The man looks up and sets down his pen. “Who’s this?” he asks, his voice a low, heavy murmur.

“My name is Beatrice Baudelaire,” Beatrice says, before the woman can say anything. 

The man raises an eyebrow at her, like the woman had, and then leans back in his chair. The look he gives her isn’t suspicious—it’s appraising. Beatrice shivers. 

“Well,” he says. 

 

They put her in a room down the hall and tell her firmly to stay put. It’s a windowless room with pale walls and only a few other students, all of them her age and sitting behind typewriters, and a particularly flatfooted and wrinkled old instructor, who starts sobbing when Beatrice tells him her name. He motions to a free chair with a long white handkerchief and manages to tell her that they’re writing business letters. He motions to the blackboard and tells her there’s the format. He motions to the typewriter in front of her and tells her, please, write a nice letter, and they’ll all make it through the day. 

He shuffles away from her, back to the front of the room. Beatrice watches him go with a confused frown. She doesn’t have time for this—to be stuck here again, or to try and figure out what’s going on, or to try and reason what she’s supposed to say in a _business_ letter. She drops her eyes to the typewriter. It’s not too bad, but certainly not as nice as the one in her uncle’s office. She presses a few of the keys to test them, and they stick and then stab back into the air with loud, fierce snaps, so much that she jolts back in her chair. He’d never give her a typewriter this bad. 

Beatrice gets an idea. 

She has to get word to him somehow. She has to survive, too, and she’s perfectly capable of doing that anywhere, although she would prefer to do it in a situation where she isn’t at risk of being accosted violently around the ankle at any given moment, among other things. It seems like her best bet to get to him is to stay here, and not wait, this time, but let them lead her to him. It won’t be too hard. This city and this organization are his. He’s here, in this room, and he’s here, in this city, and she _knows_ she will find him if she stays here. 

She gives herself a shake and rests her fingers on the keys. 

_Dear Sir_ , she types, one eye on the instructor, now leaning against the wall and wiping his face with the handkerchief. _I am writing to inquire further on the matter we discussed earlier this year. I’m in my business letter writing class, which is taught by a flat-footed man so sad and unaware that I am certain he will give me an A on this assignment without reading anything but the first sentence of each paragraph. I could say anything here at all. For instance: a “baticeer” is a person who trains bats. I learned that in a poem I watched you read_. 

The instructor straightens up, still dabbing under his eyes, and wanders around the room, glancing periodically at the typewriters. Beatrice schools her expression into business-like thoughtfulness. When he comes by, he scans the first line of her letter, heaves an enormous sigh, and keeps walking. 

_After careful consideration_ , Beatrice continues, biting down a smile, _I am pleased to enclose the following information._

 

The instructors confirm her identity after careful consultation with twenty different people, all of whom Beatrice has never seen before, and a series of photographs and files Beatrice isn’t allowed to see, all of them crowded in an office and staring down at her an hour and a half after Beatrice has finished her business letter. 

They tell her it was very irresponsible of her to sneak out like that from the country headquarters. Beatrice does not tell them it was very irresponsible to have a lock so easy to pick and a headquarters so easy to navigate in the dark. She stares back up at them, tries to look appropriately chided, and hopes they’ll think she feels appropriately chided. What she does feel is cornered. 

One of the adults standing towards the back, his face in shadows, scoffs under his breath. “Just like her uncle,” he says. 

“Which one?” asks another. 

“You know,” he says, waving a dismissive hand. “That one.” 

“The dead one?”

“Aren’t they _both_ dead?” asks a different voice. 

“No, I’m sure at least one of them is alive—didn’t you get that message?”

“You know for a fact I haven’t gotten a single olive jar in three months, since _someone_ broke my refrigerator—”

“For the last time,” someone sighs, “I did not _break_ your refrigerator—”

Beatrice takes the opportunity to slip unnoticed from the room and into the hallway. She takes slow steps, listening to the little click of her shoes on the tile. The adults at the country headquarters had been secretive but easy to predict. The adults here, though— 

She stops. She peers down, past the hem of her dress, and lets herself look at her left ankle. 

It’s not that she doesn’t like it here, with this organization. They’ve given her a place to stay, and most of the volunteers her age were kind to her at the last headquarters. Most of all, she has vague memories of Violet telling her that people who read that many books can’t be _all_ bad, that most of them were just trying their best, that they’d been noble enough in the end. But she’d said it with a curious look on her face that Beatrice can almost picture, like there was so much more Violet wasn’t sure how to say, like she still hadn’t figured something out, and it hurt to think about it. 

That silence had carved out a worry in Beatrice, a hole she feels in her stomach now. She tries to imagine a permanent mark on her ankle, a tie, an anchor, bigger than a promise to be noble enough. She knows what Violet and Klaus and Sunny told her about what happened to them, and she knows what she’s read in the thirteen files, and she knows Klaus wrote in his commonplace book that the organization was their only hope. She knows there are a good many details that maybe they hadn’t left out when they told her their story, but maybe just hadn’t gotten around to telling her at the time. Beatrice knows about the hard choices between what seems right or wrong—and she knows the iron grip that woman had on her ankle. She knows about the circumstances that killed her family, her uncle, her parents. 

Because she could be wrong, she has to be certain. Beatrice doesn’t like being wrong. She looks up at the hallway, the old pictures on the walls, the lack of windows, the flickering lights casting shadows around her, and tries to feel certain that her only choice is to stay. 

 

With the considerable amount of volunteers in the city, Beatrice figures she’ll have to share a room with someone, but one of the adults takes her to a single room, off to the side, and tells her, once again, to stay there and not make any trouble. 

It’s a simple room, with a bed, a closet, a desk, two lamps, and a bookshelf (already stocked, and she stops perusing it when she finds the book about the girl and the egg and the family dinner, because her hands start to shake). No windows. The walls are all solid stone, but the floors are wood, and Beatrice turns the lights off and stands in almost total darkness—there’s still a sliver of light under the door from the hallway—and tests out the places where the floor squeaks for hours. She memorizes the room, feels with her hands for catches or knobs or secret compartments and doesn’t find a single one. 

The light under the door disappears. Beatrice, standing by the bed on the opposite wall, goes completely still. She listens. 

After ten seconds, the lock on the door clicks. 

After a whole three minutes, the shadow under the door still hasn’t moved. Beatrice swallows and keeps watching. She knows better than to try and pick this lock. They aren’t going to make getting out easy. Finding him might not be as easy as she thought, either. 

_That doesn’t mean I won’t_ , Beatrice thinks. 

 

She fully expects to sit through their classes again, to tell the teacher how Sunny taught her to make a meringue, to relearn the same codes she learned from Klaus’s commonplace book, to listen to someone besides Violet explain the scientific principles of the convergence and refraction of light. 

She doesn’t. Instead, she finds herself in the vice principal’s office again, early in the morning, although it’s impossible to tell in all the shadows in his office. She takes a moment to wonder where the principal is, but then the vice principal starts talking. 

“You strike me as a young woman with a lot on her mind,” he says. “Someone very intent on her goals. And we value that here, you know. Commitment, dedication, loyalty. I think you—and the organization—would benefit the most if we assigned you to a chaperone immediately. There’s a place for you in this world, Miss Baudelaire, and I am most anxious for you to find it.”

Beatrice almost thinks he’s being incredibly nice, if it isn’t for the way his eyes glitter and the way he leans back in his chair, so slowly she barely notices until he’s staring down at her, almost pinning her in place. 

Violet did teach her to be polite, but she also taught her to stand her ground. She swallows. “Thank you very much,” she says. “Do I get to pick my chaperone?” 

“I’m afraid not,” he says, and he doesn’t sound the least bit apologetic. “We haven’t allowed that for quite some time.” The vice principal smiles. “It lead to some unfortunate events.” 

 

Her chaperone is a woman named Marguerite. Beatrice looks through every record available and can’t find any positive proof that Marguerite has ever had a last name. What she does find out is that Marguerite spent her own apprenticeship working with the remaining volunteer animals. 

She gets a letter telling her to meet her at the aquarium on the other side of the city, with just enough for the bus fare. Beatrice checks the letter over and over again the whole way there, but she doesn’t find any other hint about what she’s supposed to do to find her chaperone. 

Beatrice wanders the aquarium for a long, uneasy hour before a short woman with chin-length, curly blonde hair catches her eye by the jellyfish tank. The woman gestures at one of the jellyfish. “I always thought they looked like clouds,” she says, in a soft voice. “I like to look at them when summer is dying.” 

Beatrice bites her lip. She stares at the jellyfish and tries not to see them, tries to watch the reflections in the glass instead. _Summer is dying_. She always thought she’d be good at codes if she had to use them, but actually hearing them out loud just makes her uncomfortable. It could just be all the water, though. 

“Well,” she says carefully, “summer is over and gone. And you can see clouds any time, you just have to look for them.” 

The woman smiles, a surprisingly gentle smile, the lines at the corners of her eyes crinkling. Beatrice thinks she looks too young to have lines like that. “Marguerite,” she says, extending her hand. “You must be Beatrice.” 

Beatrice shakes her hand. 

“What sort of animals do you like, Beatrice?”

Beatrice looks away from the eerie blue glow of the tanks around them and says the first thing that comes to mind. “I don’t think bats are all that bad.” 

 

As it turns out, the organization’s last collection of trainable bats is in the hills. The whole trek back into the mist, Beatrice can’t help but think her timing could sure use some work. 

 

Beatrice and Marguerite set up camp in the cave, close to the shepherds and obviously very close to the bats. They pull down the remains of the wallpaper, and between the two of them, Violet’s inventing knowledge, and another piece of wire from Marguerite’s pocket, they rig up the light bulb. It casts a dim and hollow yellow light around the cave before it sputters and flickers, drenching them in a momentary darkness before lighting back up. 

Beatrice gasps out of shock. The light bulb reminds her of the lamp in the vice principal’s office, something scary and unknown in a place that’s supposed to be safe. Fear grips her chest, and she makes an excuse to Marguerite that she doesn’t even remember and gets out of the cave as quickly as possible. She sits at the mouth of the cave in the darkness with her legs stretched out in front of her, her hands in her lap. Beatrice tells herself that hugging her legs to her chest would not be very mature. 

Marguerite comes over and sits down beside her, not too close but not too far away. “Some children are afraid of the dark,” she says. 

“I’m not,” Beatrice says, truthfully. Klaus taught her constellations, and Sunny made up her own, and Violet made a telescope so they could see them better. Beatrice knows there are beautiful things in the darkness, and she likes the quiet. 

“It’s alright if you are,” Marguerite says gently. 

Beatrice knows why Marguerite says that. It’s something a lot of the chaperones think. Some of the adults themselves are probably scared of the dark, even when they haven’t lived through a storm at sea. But she’s not. She’s not scared of the dark. The afternoon was when the storm started, and the dark was when the storm stopped, when everything calmed down. She couldn’t see anything at all, not the broken wood under her fingers or how alone she was, and she could breathe. She could keep floating and imagine Violet and Klaus and Sunny were still right there, telling her she’d make it. 

Too much light is what frightens her. Too much light, like a jagged streak through the sky, lightning carving the boat in two, illuminating every fractured piece and the fear on Sunny’s usually calm face. The flashlights of the volunteers who found her, combing the beach for something else, the beams cutting cold white light against the sand. 

“Beatrice?”

Beatrice looks up. She uncurls her fingers, which she only now notices had clenched tight into her palms. She swallows. “I’m not afraid.”

Marguerite smiles. She reaches over and squeezes one of Beatrice’s hands, just once. 

 

“We’re going to be training bats to deliver messages,” Marguerite says in the morning. “It’ll be useful, especially all the way out here in the hills.”

Beatrice stares at Marguerite, and she hopes her incredulity isn’t too apparent on her face. She clears her throat and tries to think about how Violet would address this. “Are bats really the best to use?” she asks. “What about telegram wires, or even just pigeons, since they could fly at any time, or—”

“Sometimes we have to send messages at night, and bats come in handy for that.” Marguerite doesn’t interrupt her, just speaks patiently, reasonably, like making a point in a casual debate. “Sometimes the easier way can be more dangerous. People expect that more than something different.” 

Beatrice isn’t sure if that makes complete sense. Marguerite definitely notices her confusion, and she smiles. Marguerite smiles a lot, but it’s never condescending. “It can be a little hard to understand,” she says. “I thought it was when I was your age, too. But it’s not a volunteer’s job to question, Beatrice. It’s a volunteer’s job to know, and to trust in what they’re doing.” 

Somehow, it sounds right the way Marguerite says it, with her soothing voice. It sounds right, the idea of just _knowing_ , since Beatrice is so certain in it anyway. She has to remind herself that they started this whole conversation about the absurdity of bats being used as a messenger system to counteract that. Beatrice has seen a lot of absurd things, because Violet told her about all her inventions over the years, and Beatrice isn’t quite sure how all of them worked but she knows that they did. But training bats, especially to deliver messages, just seems to take it a little too far. 

“It’ll take a bit of time before we can train them that well, though,” Marguerite says. “Have you ever held one before?”

 

At the very least, training bats gives Beatrice something to think about. You really have to focus, otherwise they squeak too much. It gets easy after a while, once Beatrice knows how to do it. Marguerite is impressed, but Beatrice just tells her that you can do anything as long as you know how to do it. 

Marguerite isn’t very talkative, which Beatrice appreciates. What she does say doesn’t always make that much sense, but she never pushes Beatrice or pressures her. She tells Beatrice stories about her own apprenticeship, the last of the volunteer feline detectives and what Marguerite’s own chaperone told her about the eagles. It’s the kindest anyone has ever treated her since Violet and Klaus and Sunny, and that makes Beatrice feel more comfort than she has in some time. 

 

Beatrice is hunched over a notebook while sitting at the mouth of the cave, trying to figure out how to get the bats to follow the patterns of the yaks, because she’s sure that makes at least some sense, when the young shepherd who loaned her the yak last time comes up to her. Beatrice smiles at him, but she stops when she sees how nervous he looks. 

“Can I help you?” she asks. 

The shepherd bites his lip, looking over his shoulder at Marguerite, who’s examining one of the yaks in the field, and then motions quickly at Beatrice. “You forgot something,” he says.

Beatrice frowns. “What?” 

He reaches into one of his pockets and pulls out a small circle. The weak sunlight catches on the slim gold band and the dark diamond set in the center, and Beatrice’s heart leaps when she can see the thin initial in the stone. He puts the ring in Beatrice’s hand and presses her fingers around it. 

“I think you might be able to give it back to her, one of these days,” he says. 

“Do you know her?” Beatrice asks, clutching the ring with both hands. “Do you know where—” 

But the shepherd shakes his head, glances again at Marguerite, goes rigid when he sees the older shepherd approaching her, and then scampers away. Beatrice watches him go, until he’s a shrinking figure among the yaks and she can hear Marguerite calling her name. She lets herself wonder, for a moment, where the Duchess of Winnipeg is now, how much the shepherd knows, why no one can ever give her a clear answer. Then she reminds herself that none of that matters. She has all the answers she needs. She just has to get through this. She just has to get through this, and find her uncle, and then find her family, and she just _has_ to get through this. 

She slips the ring in her pocket. 

 

She turns ten while they’re in the hills, which she only knows because she packed a calendar this time. She doesn’t tell Marguerite because Beatrice doesn’t want her to make a big deal out of it, because Marguerite would, and Beatrice spends that night staring up at the stars and trying to make up her own constellations. She connects lines and dots into books, wrenches, a whisk. Then, with her eyes shut tight, she tries to remember that last birthday. It was four or five years ago now, wasn’t it? And there was cake, she _knows_ there was. 

Beatrice forces her eyes open. What she remembers is Violet, tying her hair back with a ribbon as she worked on the boat; Klaus, adjusting his glasses as he read to Beatrice from a book; Sunny, talking cheerfully into the radio Violet had built. Everything else is all in pieces, a puzzle she’s losing the parts to. 

_I have to find them_ , she thinks, blinking fast. _No. I will find them_. 

 

The first time Beatrice sends out a bat and it comes back, days later, with a message from one of the shepherds they’d sent out to expect it, she feels a lot more pride than she ever thought she would about training bats to be mail carriers. Marguerite laughs and sweeps Beatrice up into a tight hug, drawing her close, and Beatrice hugs her back. 

 

In late summer, the hills still misty and chilly, they get called back to the city. Marguerite and Beatrice make their way back to the city on foot this time, through all the hills, no mountain. Beatrice sorely wishes she still had the yak. 

 

When they get back to the city, Beatrice actually doesn’t see much of Marguerite. Marguerite tells her only that something is happening, but not exactly what. In the meantime, she tells Beatrice it’s for the best if Beatrice stays at headquarters, where she can write up the reports on training the bats. Beatrice figures someone would’ve had to write the reports at some point, so she doesn’t mind—except that someone seems to be watching her at all times, especially when she uses a typewriter. 

Beatrice spends most of her time underground and growing increasingly frustrated, because it’s been _months_ since she’s written to him, months since he’s heard from her, and he must be wondering where she is. He must be. She’s watched mail leave the city headquarters, and they never put a return address on anything. How can he write back to her if he doesn’t know where she is? 

But he has to know. He’s been here. He’s in this city, and so is she, and wouldn’t he be able to figure out what happened to her, being a detective and all, or at least a man who has that printed on his door? He went through this too, he _knows where she is_ , why does it have to take so long? 

Marguerite comes back, and they go on assignments and scope out pet stores and parks and the occasional fancy restaurant, but Marguerite also lets her look in every single diner window they pass, and lets her linger on the street with the Rhetorical Building, even when the street is wildly out of their way. Then they go on less and less assignments, and she sees less and less of Marguerite, and Beatrice spends her time in so much silence that it starts to dig under her skin, a burrowing restlessness. 

At night, she sneaks into the record room again. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for. Maybe the four files she couldn’t find at the country headquarters, or anything about her family, or anything about the organization. Anything at all about anything. And it’s not to find anything new, it can’t be, it’s just—it’s just to reassure her. He’s going to find her. She’s going to find him. They’re going to find her family. 

In the back of the room, in a dusty filing cabinet drawer she has to pry open with two pens, she finds a thin, dark brown folder half-stuck under the back of the cabinet. Beatrice wiggles it out, flips it open, and sees the shape of a single piece of paper. She pulls out a flashlight from her pocket, steels herself, and flicks it on, squinting against the light. 

It looks like a legal document, almost like a sort of deed, yellowed with age. Beatrice scans through it, and her frown deepens when she finds out it’s for a room in an office building, a room on a fourteenth floor, an office—an office in the Rhetorical Building, right above his. Beatrice grips the edges of the paper and reads further. Her heart stops dead when she sees a bold, imposing signature in red pen across the bottom of the page. 

_Beatrice Baudelaire._

She’s been in the building, but she’s certainly never tried to get an office there. This must be _her_ , she realizes, reminding herself to inhale. This must be who they named her after. 

Beatrice knows about Beatrice Baudelaire. She wasn’t just engaged to Beatrice’s uncle once, she was a person, a mother. She taught Klaus how to fence and how to throw a punch, and she taught Sunny how to scream, and she taught Violet how to stand her ground and be fierce and formidable. She could bake and sing and act, and she ate strawberries in the summer and danced with her husband to old records and took her family to the beach and read long books to them and did different voices for each character. Now, years later, here she is. A whisper in Beatrice’s ear, a gentle kiss on her forehead. 

Beatrice Baudelaire sounds like she was a wonderful mother. 

Beatrice shakes her head quickly and slips the deed into her pocket. It’s not like she thinks about her own mother a lot. Beatrice knows all about her anyway. Kit Snicket was a good person, a volunteer, someone who helped. So was Dewey Denouement. But sometimes she wonders, just a little, just for a moment, what things would be like if her mother was alive. If her father was alive. If they would’ve liked her. If they would’ve read to her, if they would’ve taught her things, if they would’ve liked strawberries or some other fruit and if they danced and if they baked and if they could act or sing. If she’d still be here, scrambling for the remains of her family. If she’d still see flashes of lightning when she closes her eyes, and the harpoon gun and fungus she’s imagined and the sandy grave at the far edges of her memory and the Baudelaires got their parents, didn’t they, if only for a while, how come she didn’t get hers, how could Violet and Klaus and Sunny do that— 

Something creaks upstairs. 

Beatrice slips from the records room, shuts the door, and feels her way through the darkness. Her hands find the banister of the stairs, and she creeps up them slowly, waiting for another noise. 

The upstairs floor creaks for a second, and then stops. Then another creak, a little further down the hall, like someone’s taking long strides, trying to be light and quick. Beatrice heads up the rest of the stairs and sees the hazy outline of a shape in the darkness, one with short, curly hair. 

“Marguerite?” 

Marguerite turns, looking over her shoulder, still poised to keep going down the hallway. “Beatrice,” she breathes.

Beatrice hasn’t seen her in what feels like ages, although she knows it’s only been about a week. She walks towards Marguerite, and even in the darkness she can feel a heavy tension in the air. “Where are you going?” 

Marguerite turns around all the way and bends down in front of Beatrice. “I’m sorry,” she says softly, “but I have to leave.” 

Beatrice hears every word of that sentence perfectly, and somehow she still doesn’t understand it. She blinks. “What do you mean?” 

“I was going to leave this with the vice principal for you,” Marguerite says. Beatrice hears a slight rustle, Marguerite digging in a pocket. She takes Beatrice’s hand and places something in it, a curved, spiral wire with a handle at the top. A corkscrew. “Something—something came up, and it’s not safe for me to be in the city anymore. I’m starting back for the hills tonight.” 

“I can go with you,” Beatrice says, “I can—”

“No,” Marguerite sighs. “I can’t take you with me. I really am—so, so sorry, Beatrice.” Her voice cracks, and her hand settles on Beatrice’s shoulder. “There was so much I was looking forward to, so many things I wanted to do with you, but sometimes things don’t work out how you want them to. But you’ll be okay, I know you will. You’re brave and resourceful, and you’ll be a wonderful volunteer.” 

Beatrice frowns at the slim outline of Marguerite’s face. Her fingers curl around the corkscrew, pushing it hard into her hand. She swallows and finds a lump in her throat, one she tries to breathe around. “But I—”

“Don’t worry,” Marguerite says. Her voice is still so gentle, but it doesn’t make sense with her words. Nothing about any of this makes sense. “You’ll know what to do, Beatrice. We all do. I _know_ you will.”

“I know now,” Beatrice says quickly, “I just—” 

“I have to go,” Marguerite whispers. The weight of her hand disappears from Beatrice’s shoulder, and then her face is gone, and Beatrice stands in the hall and listens to Marguerite’s progress downstairs from the distant creak of the floorboards. The sound of footsteps vanishes not long after, and Beatrice is alone. The metal of the corkscrew sits cold against her palm. 

Beatrice listens, and listens, and listens, and hears nothing else. 

Beatrice hasn’t cried in a long time. She knows she has—everyone does when they’re younger, and she can remember, through that fog, Sunny making faces at her to cheer her up—but it feels such a wrong thing to do now. Hot tears spill down her cheeks, her eyes squeezing shut, her mouth pressed tight so the rising whimper in her throat doesn’t escape.

It’s not as if she didn’t expect Marguerite to leave. All the chaperones do, eventually, and even if she had liked Marguerite she knew somewhere it wouldn’t last. She just didn’t think it would happen like this, so soon, that just like that she’d be _gone_ , swept away from her. All the thoughts Beatrice tries so hard not to think come rushing into her—how much longer will this take, how much longer will she have to do this, how much longer will this feel, because she feels ten years old for the first time and so _lost_ , still adrift in an ocean that could tear her apart as much as it could lead her somewhere safe. She wants to go home, but the only people who were ever home to her feel further away than ever. In a second, the despair and uncertainty she’s been running from overtake her like a crashing wave. 

She thinks awful, vicious things. The Baudelaires are dead or they would’ve come for her by now; her uncle hates her and never wants to see her; her mother was a horrible person to die and leave her all alone like this; she’ll grow up like they all did, abandoned. 

Beatrice walks back to her room, step by step. She shuts the door, and then sinks down and starts sobbing into her knees. 

 

The vice principal calls her to his office the next morning. Beatrice sits in the chair in front of his desk, her hands in her lap. She’s shoved the memory and the uncertainty and the guilt of last night to the back of her mind, but it still flutters in her lungs, a light panic she tries to smother with each careful breath.

He seems to have acquired even more sugar bowls since the last time she was in here, and they tower above her on those whisper-thin shelves and make the office feel even tighter. A different item sits on the shelf right behind his desk, about the size of a milk bottle, and Beatrice stares at it. It stares back at her with a dark, beady eye, the long face and snout of an impossibly cruel animal, teeth bared and black. Then she notices—it’s only half of a statue, like it’s been cut down the middle, revealing a smooth, solid wood interior. 

The vice principal himself looks unbothered, impassive as always. “It seems you’re without a chaperone,” he says. 

Her hands tighten together involuntarily. “I’ve been without a chaperone before,” she says, and her voice only trembles a little. 

He smiles. It is a thin and humorless smile, smug, and he leans slowly, too casually, back in his chair, his elbows on the armrests and his own hands folded neatly. She wishes he would stop doing that. 

“You look like you want to ask me something,” he says. 

_Where is my family and when will I find them?_

But she knows he won’t tell her. “What do you want to ask me?” she says instead.

The vice principal almost laughs. His eyes are dark and fathomless blue. “What did Marguerite leave you?” 

Beatrice does not think of the corkscrew up in her room. But she has to say something, she has to show him something. She puts her hand in her pocket and finds the folded-up deed she’d stuck there last night. A deed for an office in the Rhetorical Building. A deed signed with an identical name. 

She stares at the vice principal straight on. “An office,” she says. “On the fourteenth floor of the Rhetorical Building.” Beatrice pulls the paper from her pocket, unfolds it, and sets it square on his desk. 

He stares at it, and then keeps staring at it, his eyes flicking over the paper as if looking for a loophole. When he doesn’t find any, his mouth thins, his jaw clenching. She’s never seen him with so much emotion on his face before. 

“I’ll need a typewriter,” Beatrice says. 

 

The next thing Beatrice does is get business cards. They say _Beatrice Baudelaire_ , so no one will bother her about that, and then _Baticeer Extraordinaire_ , because that’s the closest thing to an occupation she has right now, and then _The Rhetorical Building_ , since that is the name of the building, and finally _Fourteenth Floor_ , which is self-explanatory. 

The third thing she does is go to her office. It hasn’t been used in a long time, so it’s empty and dusty and even colder than the lobby, and full of one too many spiders. Beatrice spends an afternoon cleaning the years out of it, and even repairs the radiator, Violet’s ribbon keeping her hair back from her face. 

She sets her typewriter carefully on the desk, puts Klaus’s commonplace book in one of the locked drawers, puts the corkscrew in a completely different drawer, and then realizes she has very little else to put in the room. A business card taped to the door, some paper beside the typewriter. The brochures and books she collected from the train stations lined up on the little shelf on the wall. She keeps the Duchess of Winnipeg’s ring on a long chain around her neck so she always has it with her and no one else can see it. 

She uses the back entrance so she doesn’t have to go through the lobby. 

She stays awake in the office the first few nights, watching the window in the dark in case they try to come back for her, but Beatrice is left alone there. 

 

Beatrice doesn’t know how old the building is exactly, but it must be old, because the wood creaks, and it creaks specifically and consistently in his office, right below hers, muffled but very distinct. 

She finishes typing her most recent letter, pulls it out of the typewriter, then takes the corkscrew from her desk and sits down in the middle of the floor. 

The wood parts, splitting easily into tiny spiral shavings, and Beatrice keeps twisting and twisting the corkscrew until there’s a reasonable hole in the floor and she can hear the creaking a little more clearly. It’s a small hole, not large enough to see through but large enough to put her letter through if she rolls it into a tiny tube, like she said she would. She throws the corkscrew back on her desk, grabs the letter, and starts to roll it up. 

The creaking stops. Then the wood groans low, like he’s leaning on a specific spot, and she leans close and listens.

“Snicket,” says a woman’s voice. 

Beatrice startles, jumping back with a slight gasp. She didn’t account for someone else, she didn’t think he _knew_ anyone else, she didn’t think it _wouldn’t_ be him pacing. She doesn’t know who this is. 

“Did you always have that hole in your ceiling?” the woman says.

Someone replies. Beatrice can’t hear what he says, but the voice is a low murmur. _That’s him_ , she thinks, biting her lip. _That’s him._

“You want me to come in here and find you buried under your ceiling one of these days?” the woman continues. “Don’t you think I deal with enough already as your editor?” 

He says something else, something Beatrice still can’t hear. 

The woman sighs. “If we don’t leave soon, we’re going to be late, and Cleo might just kill you.” 

Beatrice waits until she hears the door close, and then sits for a few seconds in the silence, willing her heart to stop rocketing in her chest. She re-rolls the letter, looks down at the hole, and then pushes the letter through it and presses her ear against the floor. Beatrice can just barely hear it bounce off the ceiling fan, uncurl, and land open and waiting on his desk with the tiniest crinkle of the paper. 

She sits back on the floor with a long sigh. She hopes she isn’t waiting too long, and Beatrice doesn’t do a very good job of squashing down the worry that she might not know how long it’ll take. 

 

She waits a whole week and still doesn’t get a reply. No one comes to her door, no one tries to get in through the fire escape, no one leaves any secret messages anywhere, and she doesn’t hear anyone pacing in the office below her. She doesn’t hear the woman’s voice, and she doesn’t hear any sign that he’s in there at all. Everything is eerily quiet.

Beatrice goes across the street to the diner, because she figures being miserable but not hungry is better than being miserable _and_ hungry. When she pushes the door open, Jake Hix catches sight of her from behind the counter and grins broadly. “Hey, Beatrice!” 

She means to smile, but there are four people sitting at the counter, and all of them turn and look at her with interest. Two men wearing glasses who look like brothers, a sharp-eyed blonde woman in a cloche hat, and then the man in the middle, pale and staring at her with wide eyes. Beatrice looks back at him, suddenly breathless. Not just a mysterious figure she’s never seen, or one she glimpsed in the middle of a chase, but a real, physical person in front of her. 

“It’s _you_!” she exclaims. “You’re here!” 

They keep eye contact for a single, almost terrifying second—but then he clears his throat, holds up a hand, and spins around, putting his back to her. 

Beatrice stands there, torn between disbelief and irritation. The other two men say something, and the woman rolls her eyes, gets up, pulls them to their feet, and herds them past Beatrice and out of the diner. 

“Give him a moment,” the woman whispers to her, winking. 

She doesn’t _want_ to, she wants to go over and sit beside him and get right to things, but she picks a corner booth by the window anyway and sits down. She still has a good view of the counter from here. She swallows and tries to quell her anticipation. She wonders how long a moment is, to her uncle. 

Jake walks over and gives her a smile. “What can I get you?”

Beatrice looks over his elbow at the counter, at the glass resting in front of her uncle. It occurs to her that she’s actually never had his drink of choice. She looks back up at Jake. “A root beer float.” 

Jake smiles. 

“And, could you please do me a favor?” she asks, unzipping her bag and digging around inside. “If I give you a message, would you give it to him?” 

“Sure thing,” Jake says. 

She takes out one of her business cards and turns it over. 

_Cocktail Time_

_I am sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends. I only wanted to talk to you._

_The waiter agreed to bring this card with your drink. If you don’t want to meet me, rip it in half when you are done with your root beer float, and I will leave and never try to contact you again._

Ideally, she doesn’t want to say that, to give him an out, now that they’re both here, now that she’s this close, but it’s polite. She figures he’ll appreciate that. 

_But if you want to meet me,_ she continues, biting her lip, _I’m the ten-year-old girl at the corner table._

 _B._

Beatrice folds the card in half and hands it to Jake. She watches Jake walk back to the counter, lean in and hand her card to her uncle, watches him open it with shaking fingers. He reads it, but he doesn’t turn around and look at her yet. He takes a sip of his root beer. 

Jake brings her her own root beer, and she drinks it and barely tastes it, her eyes still fixed on her uncle. She reminds herself not to swing her legs and settles for jiggling her foot against the smooth tile, a tiny little tap as she waits and waits and waits. She thinks of looking anywhere else, trying to remain sophisticated and calm, because this is _it_ , for real, but she doesn’t want to miss a single thing. She curls her hands together in her lap, forgets about the root beer float. She counts out the seconds in her head, stops when she thinks it’s stupid, starts again when he pushes his glass away and looks at the note again. 

Finally, he stands up. He refolds her business card and puts it in his pocket. Then he turns, and he faces Beatrice, coming over and stopping beside her table. 

He’s just like how Beatrice imagined him, now that she can finally see him, instead of just across a crowded street or a library wing. Definitely average height, if a little bit taller, in a grey suit and tie, his hair dark, thin at the temples. He looks at her half-finished drink, and then slowly meets her eyes, and they are blue, the same blue as hers, the best color she’s ever seen, brighter than every dark and endless sea. The corners of his mouth turn up a little, although it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He sits down across from her and extends his hand.

“My name is Lemony Snicket,” he says, his voice deep but soft, just as she expected. 

Beatrice smiles, and her face almost hurts with the force of it. She shakes his hand with both of hers. “Beatrice Baudelaire.” 

 

Lemony Snicket takes her to the park a few streets over and buys her ice cream. She points out that they could’ve had ice cream in the diner, but he tells her that he would rather have their conversation away from where a journalist could come back at any second and faithfully record every single moment of it. Beatrice eats her vanilla with sprinkles and figures the journalist had to be the woman, with eyes like that, and then she watches her uncle. Her _uncle_ , real and in person after all this time, after almost two long years of searching, finally beside her. 

He matches her pace, which isn’t very brisk, but he looks like he could run at a moment’s notice. He keeps his hat drawn low over his eyes, his gaze lingering on shadowy trees and exits and every single discarded cigarette butt before moving away. He takes quick, economical bites of his ice cream (vanilla, caramel swirl, in a cone). 

“Did you like my business card?” Beatrice asks. Her voice comes out a little louder than she intended, which probably explains why Lemony jumps. 

He pulls her business card out of his pocket. “It’s very nice,” he says. “Do you like bats?”

“Well,” she says, “I think they’re cute, but that’s all. I’d rather not work with them.” 

“Are you saying that you gave me a false business card?”

“You can put anything on a business card,” Beatrice says brightly, looking up at him. “Do you still have those ones that say you’re an admiral in the French navy?”

Lemony looks shocked, then embarrassed, and then takes an incriminating crunch out of his cone. He doesn’t answer. 

Beatrice’s throat sticks a little when she swallows her ice cream. She ducks her head, her shoulders bunching up, and scrapes at the bottom of her cup with her spoon. He’s just a quiet person, that’s all, she tells herself, and she’d thought that before. That he doesn’t have anything else to say is just because—just because he doesn’t have anything else to say. That’s fine. They have more important things to talk about than bats and business cards. 

She waits until they’ve both finished their ice cream and points out a bench for them to sit down on. She even makes sure it’s out of the way, under a tree, reasonably shady and away from prying eyes, if that’ll make him feel better. Lemony hesitates for a few seconds before he agrees, and they sit down. Beatrice’s legs dangle off the edge, and she holds her hands tight in her lap and reminds herself again not to swing her legs. 

“You said you didn’t know where Violet and Klaus and Sunny were,” Beatrice says, leaning towards him, “in your research. That you didn’t know what happened to them after—” Her voice catches. “—after we, we left the island. But that was years and years ago. You have to know now.”

Lemony looks at her, and this close, Beatrice can see the lines around his eyes, etched into his face. They only seem to deepen the longer they look at each other. He folds his hands together, just like hers, and Beatrice bites down on the inside of her lip, her toes wiggling in her shoes. 

“No, Beatrice,” he says. “I do not know where the Baudelaires are.” 

Some of the air disappears from her lungs, and she gapes at him. “Well—then can you help me find them?”

Lemony sighs. “I have looked,” he says slowly, “but my associates and I have found very little. I do not know if—”

“But you _have_ to know!” Beatrice exclaims. The corners of her eyes start to burn, and she can feel a sharp sting tightening her throat, because he was supposed to know, she was so certain, and he had to be too, so why? “You have to, you’re the only person I’ve got left, and I came all this way to find you, and you—you—” Everything comes tumbling out of her, everything she’s been pushing aside and burying down inside her since the shipwreck, every cruel thought and punch to the gut, every second spent waiting. She’s never talked this much in her whole life, and now she can’t stop, even with Lemony looking at her with wide, broken eyes. 

“You left me all _alone_ out there!” Beatrice shouts, her voice cracking. “I followed you for two years, all by myself, and I wrote you letters, and I followed you into the hills, and I stole office space to be close to you, and I did _everything_ I could to find you, and you didn’t do anything!” 

She wants to be angry. She wants so much to be angry, to keep yelling, to hurt him, but now she can’t stop crying. “I thought you h-hated me,” she sobs, rubbing at her eyes, tears sticking to her fingers and her cheeks. “I th-thought you never wanted to see me, ever. I thought—I thought—”

Something soft brushes against her wrist, and she lowers her hands and finds Lemony, offering her a handkerchief. “I did not, and I do not hate you,” he murmurs firmly, for a man as heartbroken as he looks. “I could never.” 

Beatrice takes the handkerchief and wipes at her eyes. It doesn’t do much in the way of stopping her tears. 

“This is an awful thing to say,” Lemony begins quietly, “but the horrible truth is that I did not know if it was you. I did not know if you were—someone else.” 

Beatrice swallows thickly, curling her fingers around the handkerchief, clutching it in her lap. She knows what he means and it’s like a dull knife twisting inside her. 

“And I know you are not her,” Lemony continues, “or my sister—although you do look remarkably like her—or an old villainess intent on exacting a stiletto-heeled revenge after all these years, or a morally grey woman for whom I still feel a great deal of sadness and guilt. I wondered, though. I think even the most rational mind will wonder in the depths of loss, even when it knows better. It is a wound that does not want to heal, or at least one that I believed could not. When I did know it was you, which I assure you was only within the last year, I—I did not know if I could help you.”

“Why not?” Beatrice asks, sniffling. She chances a look up at him, out of the corner of her eye, and catches a quick, haunted look passing over his face. He stays quiet for a little longer, as if figuring out the right words. 

“I was afraid,” he whispers. “It is no excuse for what I did to you, but it is a reason. When I was a little older than you, I made a considerable amount of promises, few of which I managed to keep, and I told myself that fear didn’t matter, which was an admirable if incredibly incorrect stance to take at the time. And since then, very few things have gone right. I lost my family, my friends, the loves of my life, and everything I had, because of that fear. You can have the best of intentions, and still doubt, and still worry, and only realize much later that all you’ve ever done was wrong. I once said that people do difficult things for more or less noble reasons—but it is truly so much harder than that.”

Beatrice lets the words sink in. She thought she knew what it was like to struggle with a decision, to do something villainous to be noble. She thought she understood her uncle and her family—all of it—after everything she’d read, after Klaus saying that it took a severe lack of moral stamina to commit murder, after Sunny suggested it and the fire regardless, after Violet worried about Hal’s keys and disguising her and her siblings and all the other tricky things Beatrice remembers her worrying about. 

_He looks like Violet_ , Beatrice realizes suddenly. Not really his facial features, but his expression, just like when Violet told her the volunteers were _noble enough_. He looks as lost and worried about the consequences as Violet did that day. She feels that hole in her stomach again, that gaping uncertainty—that _fear_. Beatrice thinks of avoiding the lobby where the woman grabbed her ankle, lying to Marguerite in the hills, covering up her doubts with a vehement optimism. She thinks of every time she read about Lemony’s fear and all the things she didn’t understand until this second, all the things she still doesn’t understand, because there is still so much, so many secrets she could drown in, trying to find them all by herself. 

“I put you in a great amount of danger by not stepping in,” Lemony says. He looks at her straight on, his eyes filled with tears. “I did to you the same thing for which I despised so many people, people I too was supposed to trust, because of my cowardice. I cannot apologize to you enough, and you do not have to accept it, Beatrice. I would not blame you if you didn’t.” 

Beatrice sniffles again, her mouth wobbling, and watches him for a moment longer. “I don’t know,” she says carefully. She doesn’t like saying it, but it’s true and she has to say it. She takes a breath. “I don’t know.” 

They sit in silence on the bench for some time. Lemony wipes his eyes at some point with the back of his hand, and Beatrice holds his handkerchief back up to him, but he shakes his head with a small, trembling smile and tells her to keep it. Beatrice runs her thumb over the handkerchief, each individual stitch along the hem, the afternoon breeze drying her face. She thinks, almost impossibly, that she feels a little less lonely. Not quite not alone, but just not as lonely. 

“Although my associates and I have found very little,” Lemony says, “that isn’t to say that there is nothing to find. If you would like, I would like to help you find the Baudelaires.” 

Beatrice’s head shoots up, her eyes wide. “Really?” 

“Really. We can hope for the best, at least.” 

“I’m good at that,” Beatrice says. “I—it can’t be _impossible_. Everyone thought finding you was impossible. But you’re here.” And he is, isn’t he? Despite his previous absences, here he is. It doesn’t fix everything, not immediately. But it can be enough for right now. Here he is. Here they are.

**Author's Note:**

> i went into this fanfic with a pretty clear idea of where it was going to go, and then realized i’d need to pull out the beatrice letters so i could put them in this, and then did a lot of screaming along the lines of ‘i need to put a yak in this??????????????????????????????’ and ‘good job danhan you shot a hole through my characterization AND my timeline.’ so this vibes with maybe like, 85% of the beatrice letters. i did what i could. (and then this fic gave me so much trouble when i was trying to edit it. like, _so much trouble_. i only hope this all like, reads okay.) 
> 
> but once i thought of ‘quiet lil child knows really so little about the world and has been through so much that she adamantly and somewhat optimistically clings to what she does know and that is challenged over time,’ i was reluctant to stop writing that. babybea is definitely her own person but she’s also definitely her mother’s daughter, so that girl is gonna be pretty tightly wound up and trying her best to hide it. i didn’t really buy her constant worry that lemony wasn’t who she wanted him to be while she was writing to him. because she does still have that bright but firm optimism of her father!! and i didn’t want babybea to be as rooted in (or as dependent on) vfd as her predecessors because she has to be the character to break that cycle. she has way more important problems than unattainable worldly nobility….and training bats. 
> 
> you can find me [on tumblr](https://whoslaurapalmer.tumblr.com), regularly screaming about all my asoue fics


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